Liz Fraser

Best-selling author, columnist, broadcaster

Liz Fraser is one of the UK’s best-known writers and broadcasters on all aspects of modern family life.
She appears almost daily on national TV and radio, is ITV This Morning's parenting expert, and has a back-page column in Essentials magazine, called ‘No, It’s Not Just You.’
Liz’s internationally best-selling books about the realities of being a parent re-moulded parenting forever by finally allowing it to be very funny, and accepting that we all get most of it wrong – which is just as it should be.
Her next book, a hilarious and timely delve into the wrinkly elbow-skin of mid-life, "Lifeshambles", is published in October 2014, following a run at the Edinburgh Free Fringe throughout August.
Liz is also a key panel member of the think-tank the Centre For The Modern Family, and has three children.
Liz-fraser.com
@lizfraser1

Whichever overjoyed camp you fall into, it's best to be as prepared as you can be to survive this week - armed with a list of activities to get your kids out the house and entertained (or at least quiet!) for a couple of hours

Talk to anyone who's done stand-up, and they will tell you that it's the most terrifying thing you can do. (I assume these people haven't worked down a 200-ft mine, defused any bombs, or had lunch with my mother.)

Much was exactly the same for a Fresher in Cambridge then, as it is now. Pigeon holes, hand-written names above doors, queues for the showers, toast-related gyp room fire alarms, occasional vomiting in the Scholar's Garden, pub crawls, and total confusion about how to cross from Pembroke St into Mill Lane without getting killed by a cheese delivery lorry.

When our children are very young we think we are in a living Hell.We think that nothing could EVER be as bad as this living Hell, except possibly if our father-in Law came round for tea as well and pointed out how we should just relax more.

I'm often asked to write, or give talks at conferences or on cider-soaked park benches, about women and work. Women who write, women in business, women going back to work after having a baby, women deciding not to go back to work after having a baby, juggling motherhood and work, the work-life imbalance and so on.

All this puritanical, embarrassed, shaming behaviour towards subtly feeding a human infant <em>now</em>, is a head-banging hangover from those days - days when piano legs were covered up, lest anyone find them too scandalous. Crikey.

But crowdfunding is fairly standard now, and people are getting the hang of it. Many books, films, music albums and so on have been very successfully made this way.
It's a long road, but it's A ROAD, and I am on it, and moving forwards.

One of the weirdest things about self-employement, is that nobody teaches you how to be self-employed. You just....do it. And make a lot of mistakes along the way. Over the last 17 years at the Freelance Coalface, I've learned a few really valuable things that, had I known them at the start, might have saved me a grey hair or 50.

Good news; today's teenagers are less likely to drink, smoke and take drugs than their predecessors, according to statistics from the Department of Health this week. This, it would seem, makes them the most sensible, healthy and fresh-smelling generation for a decade.

This, for some reason, seems to be a much bigger deal than turning 39, even though it requires the same amount of effort on my part, ie none. A lot of people have suddenly started asking me about my Bucket List, as if turning 40 wasn't already bad enough without also implying certain death.

HG is a very very bad version of morning sickness. Really, superbad. Mothers can become ill very quickly if they don't consume any liquids for a few days, and they really do need to seek help. And maybe now that Her Royal Highness has kindly shed some green-tinged light on a serious condition that affects 1% of expectant mothers.